Month: October 2007

Happy Halloween!

According to MSDN subscriber downloads, “Vista SP1 is expected to RTM in the first quarter of 2008.”

Although Vista has its own memory checker. It failed to detect any problems with my RAM. It runs for about an hour with 4GB of RAM.

The evaluation version of [SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10] also has a memory checker that you can boot to with the downloadable DVD bootdisk. This test is much more thorough and runs for more than 2 hours. And it did find some memory problems.

NVIDIA has a [dedicated page] for the hotfixes they recommend to be used with Windows Vista.

Vista has a handy reliability monitor to chart when your system went down. This is helpful to track down driver problems that are choking your system.

Richard Stallman describes in detail about what the GNU GPLv3 is, what you can do with it, and why you should upgrade your open source license to it:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNknNScP0tg].

What can I say about Vista now that I am a more experienced user? Well… let me show you a few screenshots of how well it works with devices.

Vista 64-bit:

Those who are waiting for the next service pack for Vista are putting in time well spent. I expected a hard time finding drivers. I did not expect how unstable Vista is. Vista is sensitive. There are many bugs in the new features added to Vista. The most frequent bug is memory access violations. I don’t know why the OS can’t just handle the violation, instead I see frequent blue screens. The only safe thing is to not do anything, and that’s not entirely safe. I’ve blue screened at every stage. The personalized login page crashes, so I couldn’t login to Vista. Upon rebooting, I got a blue screen for a “device adapter less than or equal to”; whatever than means. Explorer tends to restart a lot. The Superfetch likes to crash when renaming folders. Vista Ultimate has a nice feature that allows a video background. Unfortunately, the slightest error causes the feature to turn off. A little blame box pops up, “it was probably the video background… crash”. Some of my favorite exceptions are “PFN_LIST_CORRUPT”, “win32k.sys”, “IRQ_LESS_OR_EQUAL”, and “SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION” which all result in a blue screen. I’m ready to join the mob bleeding for Vista SP1. One positive, is each time I install a Windows update, my system gets a little more stable. And it’s nice being able to access all 4GB of ram. “Problem Reports and Solutions” is a nice tool.

With my ASUS P5N-E SLI it was necessary to update the BIOS to version 0608 to fix some of the constant lock-ups and blue screens.

One way to see if you have any driver problems is to simply go to Start > run and enter: [verifier.exe]. While verifier is active, there are way more blue screens. Collect all the data. It will help identify what hardware is causing grief. Be sure to disable verifier during normal use. That should limit the amount of blue screens.

Vista 32-bit:

This windows update fixes choppy sound when listening to music like [Pandora.com]. ===Marvell – Networking – NETGEAR WN121T Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter===

SUSE:

If Vista continues to be unstable, one alternative is to install a [SLED or BLADE].